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we will be cruising with our 4 and 7 year old girls in October. We have cruised Royal Carribean and Princess before but this will be the girls first cruise. Does anybody have a recomendation for a cruise line and ship. We also need information on how a family of four fits into one of the staterooms. Does any of the ships come with a stateroom with four beds?

Many rooms have upper berths that are like bunk beds....they have rails and a removalble ladder. We have taken our son on two RCCL cruises with us and he has loved sleeping on the upper bunk. My DH and I just push the two beds below together so it's a comfortable arrangement

Some rooms also have a pull out sofa that could probably sleep two kids easily.

RCCL has a great childrens program and we really enjoyed our family cruises with them.

If you go to the web site for the cruise line you will be cruising on you can do a virtual tour of the ship you want to cruise on or at least see pictures...including cabins.

I have cruised Carnival, Princess and Norwegian with our son and I prefer Carnival's kids program most. The staff seem very invested in the children's happiness and I was most impressed with the security of Camp Carnival.

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doris

"I travel a lot; I hate having my life disrupted by routine"--Caskie Stinnett

My daughter (now 7) has been on 3 Carnival and 2 Princess cruises and she loves it, especially going to the kids' area. The last two cruises (Princess) we were in an inside that has capacity for 4. At night the room steward takes down one of the above beds and turns down the bedding for each person needed. I'll try to add the photo here but the last two days I've been getting an error message.

5 out of 6 reviews on tripadvisor is good. The only really bad thing people said about the second hotel we stayed at in Seattle was that it was next to a highway that made it impossible to cross to get to the nearby Needle. It wasn't a problem for us (including our little one) to walk over to an intersection and continue on to the Needle. We did it several times. And our room overlooking the highway wasn't noisy at all. So take some of the complaints with a grain of salt unless most people have the same complaint, that is. The one negative may be from a really negative person and in the other vein, one positive among several negatives may be from an employee.

Hopefully the posters above who are going to the same hotel will find it clean and satisfactory.

I have found TripAdvisor to be consistently filled with cranky unreasonable people. I have almost cancelled hotel rooms due to the reviews and when I finally went everything was fabulous. You never know who is actually posting the review, could be the hotels competition. Like you said, take it with a grain of salt.

Last November we did a cruise on Diamond Princess with our dd's who are also 4&7 - cannot speak highly enough of the kids club and attention by all the staff we encountered. We also had a mini suite where the 4th bunk comes down -magically - of a night from the ceiling which our 7yo loved the 4 yr old slept below - lots of space and for us having a full size bath suited well - there was also 2 tvs which was great so the girls could watch the children's channel whilst we watched a movie or sport and we loved having the balcony and had breakfast out there most mornings...... my 2c

I cruised last summer on RCCL with my then-5-yr-old (he was actually almost 6). He absolutely loved the kids program! We were on the Explorer. The Voyager class also has a kids pool (shallow) and a water slide. We spent quite a bit of time there, too. We enjoyed so much that we are going again at Christmas this year!

We are going on our third RCCL cruise in 2 weeks. Last cruise my daughters were 3 and 6. I cannot say enough about RCCL. The Adventure Ocean program is great, both girls were a little hesitant to go at first (we only wanted them to try 1 night) but once they were there, they didn't want to leave. They went a total of 3 nights and wanted to go more, but we wanted the family time. They also went one afternoon for a couple of hours while we were in Barbados. My DH and I took a quick tour of a rum factory and headed back to the ship. This trip, they can't wait to go back to the camp on the "big boat", and want to participate in a lot more events.

Last cruise we had booked a booked a balcony cabin and we were upgraded to a JS by RCCL. This worked out really well and we booked a JS for our upcoming cruise. There is a full size pull out couch and the girls were fine on this. Plus, during the day when the pull out was folded up, we had plenty of space. The closet was large enough for all of our luggage, so we didn't have that cluttering up the room more. There is a privacy curtain to pull around the bed as well. The balcony was nice because when we came back to the room after the shows (the girls enjoyed the ice show especially), put them to bed, and we hung out on the balcony with a drink and just enjoying the quiet and the ocean. Very relaxing!

We sailed AOS last time and we are on Explorer this time. They have tons of activities, my girls like to ice skate, so we definitely took advantage of that. The min. age for the rock climbing wall is 6, so my older daughter is dying to try it this time. Also, we did go mini golfing one night after dinner which they loved as well. This class of ship also has a water slide in the kids pool area, we made great use of that! They also enjoyed just walking around the decks and through the Royal Promenade area, especially the serve yourself ice cream stand!

I highly recommend RCCL, we are tempted to try Disney, but we've been to Disney World so many times I think the girls would be expecting to see a Splash Mountain in the middle of the ship and end up being disappointed LOL!